I love books. Just love them. Everything about them. Reading them, smelling them, seeing them piled up on a shelf, touching their covers and flipping through them, pondering why they chose this specific cover design, and wondering what other versions are laying on a cutting room floor somewhere. I love bookstores and libraries, and could spend hours browsing the shelves (I usually have to get dragged out, or I will). I love discovering new books and talking about books and finding out that someone loves a book that I love. It's like finding out you both know the same secret handshake.

I use Goodreads to find new books, keep track of the books I've read (in general, but also by year), and see what my friends are reading. Sometimes I write reviews and link to them below. Sometimes I use affiliate links.

Here's what I'm reading and what I've read, from 2014 on. This includes audiobooks, which I still considering "reading" because I don't know what else to call it.

2016 (Which I am proclaiming The Year of the Book. And also The Year of the Book Review.)

1. The Boys in the Boat. (Spellbinding. One of my favorite books ever. Started in 2015 and even included it in the Gift Guide, but I had some distractions before I could finish. Still, spellbinding. And once I had the time I was done in a couple of days.)

2015 (Which turned out to be a slow reading year. I blame Candy Crush and Parenthood.)

1. In early 2015 I finished The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver. It wasn't my first time reading it. I picked it up over the summer of 2014 but got distracted. I count books for the year I finish them, but this felt a bit like cheating as I only had a chapter or so left in 2015. Oh well!

3. The Book of Life. Final book in Deborah Harkness's All Souls trilogy. People have plenty of legit issues with this series (sometimes it drags, there are inconsistencies, etc), but I just adore it. Great characters, interesting story lines, and not your average witch and vampire tale. There's science, history, and time travel to Elizabethan England.

8. I started listening to the first A Game of Thrones book, but quit maybe a quarter of the way through. I love the show, but couldn't get into the book. The audiobook, at any rate. Among other things, I found it irritating that the narrator was so inconsistent with the pronunciation of the names! YOU HAVE ONE JOB.